The Ishien went through first, backward, somehow keeping his balance as Kaden strove to bring him down. Even as they moved, Kaden could feel the other man shifting, adjusting, dropping his weapon and bringing his hands to bear, starting a pivot that would end with a throw. Kaden had no doubt he would be on the ground in moments, his face pressed into the dirt, but the man didn’t have moments. The hot sun winked out as they slipped through the invisible surface of the kenta into a stone chamber lit on all sides by torches, a stone chamber guarded by a dozen men, half of them with crossbows.
Silence reigned for a heartbeat. Then the first bolts leapt from the bows, outpacing the shouts of alarm that followed, the quick responses of reflex and fight moving so much faster than understanding. Several must have flown wide, but Kaden could feel at least two of the bolts punch into his adversary’s flesh, jolting them both. The man didn’t cry out, didn’t so much as groan, but Kaden could feel him hesitate, sagging as the steel lodged tight. Emotion should have come over Kaden then—relief or fear or savage joy—but there was no emotion inside the emptiness. He had accomplished one goal. Many remained. Quickly, he pulled himself free of the corpse, considered the rounded kenta chamber, then stepped back through the gate into the blinding sun.
He’d been gone just a few heartbeats, but everything had changed. The man he’d dragged through the kenta, who was now lying dead on the other side in some secret chamber beneath the Dawn Palace, had been the one guarding Kiel. Which meant that, at least for the moment, the Csestriim was free. His wrists remained bound behind him, but that hadn’t stopped him from moving to the kenta leading to the Shin chapterhouse, hadn’t prevented him from kicking Matol’s legs out from under him as he emerged.
It was a feeble attack, and the Ishien commander was already rising to his feet, teeth bared, but he had dropped Tan’s naczal, and Kaden took it up, the shaft cool and smooth in his hands. The violence seemed to have jolted Triste fully awake, and she writhed in the arms of her captor like a caught wolf, screaming and scratching, biting and clawing. The Ishien was larger, but the same brutal strength with which the girl had broken Matol’s hand back in the Dead Heart seemed to have surfaced once more.
Kaden circled them, cool and distant inside the vaniate, considering his options. The naczal was deadly in Tan’s hands, but he wasn’t even sure which end to strike with. Any effort to attack Triste’s captor was just as likely to hurt her as it was to reach the Ishien. He watched, searching for an opening, seeing nothing but a flurry of arms and struggling flesh. It was no good. He wasn’t Valyn or Pyrre. The monks hadn’t possessed so much as a single sword. He’d stayed alive in Annur this long only by deflecting and dodging attacks, pitting the strength of one foe against another: Adiv’s men against the Ishien, the aristocrats against the imperial guards, the soldiers on the other side of the kenta against whoever he had shoved through. The strategy had worked, until now. On the green circle of grass, cliffs dropping into the wide blue sea on every side, there was no more dodging to be had, no more deflecting. It was time to fight, and Kaden knew nothing of fighting.
“I’ve changed my mind,” Matol said. “I’m not taking you back to rot with your teacher. I’m going to gut you right here.”
He stooped, never taking his eyes from Kaden’s face, to pick up the sword dropped by his lost companion. The other Ishien shifted, blades at the ready, faces closed. The vaniate, Kaden realized. He wasn’t the only one acting from inside the trance. They were all inside the vaniate, all except Triste, who had redoubled her thrashing.
As Matol talked, Kiel slipped to Kaden’s side.
“Cut me free,” he said, glancing over his shoulder to the rope knotting his hands.
Matol pointed his sword at Kaden. “You murdered my man to help this inhuman scum, and you’re still helping him, dancing when he says dance, like a demented puppet. I’m going to put this steel in your flesh, and I’m going to watch you squirm. You should thank me. I’m going to cut the strings.”
Kaden ignored him, turning instead to slit the rope binding Kiel’s wrists. The rough fiber parted effortlessly beneath the naczal blade. That made two of them free. Kaden hesitated, then handed the spear to Kiel.
“Can you use this?”
The Csestriim took it, sighted down the shaft. “It has been many centuries,” he said, spinning the blade in a smooth, practiced motion, “but the memory is strong.”
Kiel slid in front of Kaden, blocking Matol’s advance, and suddenly the odds didn’t look so long. Matol’s jaw tightened. Evidently his reading of the scene mirrored Kaden’s own.
“Billick,” he said, turning to one of the remaining soldiers. “Get the others. They’re just beyond the Cavaltin gate. You can be back in twenty breaths.”
Kaden had no idea where Cavaltin was, or which kenta led to it, but it hardly mattered. Somewhere, somewhere close, more Ishien waited, maybe dozens more, heavily armed and ready. When they came, there would be no escape. It was just a fact, true as the sky above them was true. Billick charged across the green sward, passed through the kenta, then vanished. Triste chose that moment to twist in her captor’s grasp, sink her teeth into his collar, and then, as he roared and jerked back, to wrench free.
Matol cursed, shook his head, then spat into the grass. Triste’s panicked escape had thrown her almost directly into the man’s path, and he stepped forward, raised his sword, then hacked down in a vicious arc. Kaden could only watch as the sword fell toward her head, but Kiel was quicker, sliding the naczal into the gap, deflecting Matol’s blow into the dull earth. The Csestriim withdrew the spear, preparing another thrust, but before he could move, Triste staggered to her feet. Kaden expected her to flee, to hurl herself away from the blades, but instead she lunged forward into Matol, her face drawn with fear and fury, eyes wide as suns, hands clutching around his back, pulling him close even as she drove them both back.
“Get off me, you soulless whore,” Matol spat. He twisted, but couldn’t wrench free. With his sword arm trapped against his side, he couldn’t bring the blade to bear.
“It is you,” Triste murmured, “who abandoned your soul.”
No, Kaden realized. That isn’t Triste. The frightened child who had sobbed in his pavilion back in Ashk’lan was gone, replaced by the woman who had shattered Matol’s wrist weeks earlier. The Ishien was older than her, taller and stronger, but Triste was bearing him up and back somehow, forcing him to give ground, her muscles bent to the task, tendons straining in her legs, the backs of her knees, her neck. Strangely, she was smiling, full lips parted with the effort of breath.
“I warned you,” she said, voice lapidary as polished stone, “that this day would come.”
Matol struggled and cursed and lost ground. She was forcing him toward the kenta, and for a moment Kaden thought he understood her plan, thought she intended to force him through into the hail of crossbow bolts as he had the other Ishien. The plan had worked once; it could work again. Only she was moving toward the wrong kenta, toward the gate that led back into the basement of the Shin chapterhouse.
“No, Triste,” he shouted, gesturing to the palace gate, “the other one. The other one!”
She ignored him.
“You gave up your soul,” she said. “You thought you had burned it out with your vicious rituals, your petty faith in the power of pain.” She laughed, a full, throaty laugh. “Pain is so limited.”
“I’ll show you pain, bitch.”
The two remaining Ishien moved toward the kenta and their commander, but Kiel was faster, stepping forward to block them, raising the naczal.
“I’ll show you pain like you’d never believe,” Matol snarled, dropping his sword, wrenching his hand free and scrabbling with it at her throat.
“You would be shocked, you weak little man, at what I believe.”
Matol’s fingers closed around her neck, but Triste just smiled, pulling him closer, then pressing her lips to his. Kaden stared as she wrapped him in her embrace, her eyes closed wi
th something like rapture as she moved against him, hip to hip, mouth to mouth, like lovers in desperate ecstasy. The Ishien was still choking her even as his mouth opened to her kiss, responding to some animal call older than thought, older than hate. Triste clutching at his free arm, pressing it back, back through the space of the kenta . . .
Matol jerked as though stabbed, tried to shout, to pull away, but Triste’s hand was locked on the back of his neck. He yanked his arm from the kenta, only there was no arm left, just a blank slab of flesh with two circles of bone at the center, butchered as though with an impossibly sharp cleaver. Bone and flesh. Then blood in a fountain.
Triste pulled back a moment, smiling as Matol flailed. “Don’t think about the pain,” she cooed, “think about the pleasure. You thought you had burned it out of your soul, but I am returning it to you.” Then her lips were on his again, questing, probing, her chest pressed up against his chest as she forced him toward the gate once more. He took a step back, his leg passed the invisible plane, and he buckled, as though someone on the far side had kicked his foot out from under him.
Triste held him up, pulling him into her lips, her arms, her horrible embrace. The leg was gone. Both Matol and Triste were soaked in blood, and still she didn’t let him go. Matol writhed inside her arms, but it was no longer clear he was trying to escape, no longer clear that he could. As Kaden stared, shock scratching at the edge of the vaniate, Triste slammed the Ishien leader up against the post of the kenta, forcing her body against his, sliding a hand down his breeches even as she pivoted him against the stone once more, pivoted him into the hungry emptiness of the gate. Matol’s spine arched, his head craned back, his whole body convulsed, a series of awful, bone-wracking spasms, and then, finally, Triste let him fall. There was little left but the head and a sliver of torso. He looked more like a side of bloody beef than a man. Triste was drenched, as though she had stood for hours in a rain of blood, but she paid no attention to the red streaming down her face, dripping from her fingers. She stared at Matol, her face hard and unreadable, then licked the blood from her lips.
“Triste?” Kaden said, his mind still scrambling to make sense of what he’d seen.
She shook her head, eyes huge and blank. “What?”
Then, before he could respond, the Ishien were pouring through the gate on the far side of the island. There were at least a dozen, all in boiled wool and leather, all carrying blades and bows. A few faces Kaden recognized, others he did not. The numbers were what mattered. Triste could hardly yank all of them from the vaniate, could hardly drive all of them through the gates.
“Here,” Billick called, gesturing. “Ring them in.”
As the Ishien spread out, Kaden watched all chance of freedom slip away. No sorrow came with the realization of failure. No fear.
“Bring them down with bolts and arrows,” the Ishien went on. “To the legs only. I want them crippled, not dead.”
He glanced once at the mangled smear of flesh that had been Matol, then hefted his blade, as though testing its weight. They were taking their time, choosing their shots, but it wouldn’t be long before the arrows flew.
“Behind the kenta,” Kiel said, gesturing.
Kaden understood, retreating behind the gate with Triste just before the first hum of the bowstrings. A half-dozen arrows streaked toward them . . . then vanished into the emptiness of the kenta. The gate was a shield, but it was immobile. Even as he watched, the Ishien were spreading out, moving to the flanks. Over his shoulder, just a few paces behind, the island dropped away, cliffs plunging straight down into the shattered rocks and spray below. There would be no escape there.
“We have to go through,” he said.
“The palace archers,” Triste said, lips drawn back in a smile or a snarl. Face and hair dripping blood, she might have been some figure from nightmare, but inside the vaniate Kaden was beyond all nightmare.
“We’re behind the gate now,” Kaden said, mind humming. “We’ll come out on the opposite side, putting the kenta between us and the palace guards. It’ll shield us.”
He glanced at Kiel, and the Csestriim nodded. “Until they adjust,” he murmured.
“They’re not taking me,” Triste said, eyeing the Ishien with something like hunger. “They will never take me.”
“Our odds on the other side of the gate are slim,” Kiel said.
“They’re slim either way,” Kaden said. “Right now, confusion is our friend.”
Before they could debate the matter further, Triste loosed a defiant scream, then hurled herself through the kenta.
Kaden hesitated, probing the boundary of the vaniate. It flexed beneath his mind’s touch, like the surface of a pool of water when a leaf settles upon it, but the trance held. He took one more look at the Ishien, then followed.
The stone chamber was in chaos. Men were shouting orders at one another, waving weapons, pointing bows. The sound redoubled as Kaden emerged through the gate, reverberating off of the walls and low ceiling, the cries of anger, fear, and confusion battering him from all directions. The crossbowmen loosed another volley that passed harmlessly into the kenta. Kiel lowered the blade of the naczal, leveling it inches from the gate.
“The Ishien have a hard choice,” he said, voice calm as though discussing the evening meal. “We’re waiting on this side, the guards on the other, and they know it.”
“There’s only three of us,” Kaden said.
“But we are here,” Kiel replied. “Which gives us an edge.”
For a few heartbeats, nothing happened. The palace soldiers struggled to reload and crank their weapons while their commander shouted pointless orders. Kaden scanned the tiny space for some escape, but there was nothing to find. The chamber was only ten paces across, and seemed to be far underground, the only exit a narrow corridor blocked by a line of soldiers and crossbowmen with swords at their hips.
The corridor or the kenta. The soldiers or the Ishien. There were no good choices. Kaden reached behind him, took a torch from its sconce on the wall. It was a foolish weapon, but felt better than facing all that steel with nothing in his hands.
“We wait for the Ishien,” he said. “They’ll absorb some of the attack. When they come through, we have to force our way back through the kenta, hope we can slip past whomever they left on the island.”
Kiel nodded, but Triste didn’t move. She was staring, bloody eyes fixed on something in the corridor, a shape moving in the darkness. Kaden squinted. It looked like another soldier, a lone man arriving from the barracks or halls above. Then he stepped forward into the light.
“My father,” she snarled, hands balled into fists.
As usual, Adiv’s blindfold did nothing to hinder the sense that he was looking at you, looking straight through you. The councillor studied them, then waved a hand at the soldiers under his command. “Advance,” he said, voice hard. “Kill them.”
The palace guards managed three or four steps before the first of the Ishien charged through the kenta. Unlike Kaden, they hadn’t seen the ground, and they paused for a second just inside the gate. The guards, too, hesitated, then plunged ahead with a roar. The next moments were madness. Without the kenta shielding them from the worst of the violence, Kaden, Kiel, and Triste would have been cut to pieces almost immediately. Most of the Ishien met the palace attack, although two or three turned, searching for their quarry. Kiel stabbed one through the neck, and another through the hamstring, dropping him to the floor. Kaden thrust his torch into the fallen man’s face, blocking out his scream, ignoring the stench of burning flesh.
“Fall back,” Adiv was shouting, his voice somehow carrying above the chaos. “Drop back!”
Some of the guards retreated, while others, turning at the command, fell to the Ishien. There was a rumbling, Kaden realized, a low, implacable grinding of stone on stone, a sound he’d heard hundreds of times in the high mountains as the granite shifted against itself with the spring thaw, as great blocks sheared off from the cliffs, slidi
ng down the crags, the terrible, thundering weight shattering trees and smashing boulders, crushing everything beneath. He glanced up to see the stone ceiling shifting, the carefully mortared blocks grinding against one another, fine powder sifting down into his eyes, filling his lungs.
“Back!” Adiv called again. Kaden could hear the voice clearly enough, but he could no longer make out the leach, hidden as he was by the rising dust and the darkness of the corridor. As he strained to see what was happening on the far side of the gate, an enormous stone, ten times the size of a man, tore free from the ceiling, smashing down into the Ishien, crushing two and trapping a third, blocking off the kenta.
Kaden turned to Kiel. “What’s happening?”
The Csestriim’s eyes were hard, intent. “The leach,” he said. “He’s trying to crush us.”
Kaden stared. Several of the torches had guttered out, and the tops of the walls were trembling. There was no telling how much weight hung suspended above them, but the stone of the vaulted arch was dropping away seemingly everywhere, everywhere but right above them.
“Go,” Triste growled, her voice thick with strain. Kaden turned. Her eyes were wide, lips parted, and her chest heaved as though she’d just sprinted the Circuit of Ravens. Sweat sheened her forehead and face. Matol’s blood dripped. “Go.”
Kaden glanced up. “I’m going, come on. This whole place is falling apart.”
“I know, you fool.” She groaned. “I’m holding it up.”
There was no time to stare, no time to ask questions. Kaden seized her by the arm, thrust his torch before him into the half-lit darkness of choking stone dust, and dragged her forward. By the time they reached the door, the entire chamber was shaking, stones the size of his chest raining down like hail, shattering on the floor.
Chronicle of the Unhewn Throne 02 - The Providence of Fire: Page 69